A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

All Saints’ Day • November 3, 2024

Isaiah 25:6-9, Matthew 25:31-40

For 11 years, I was the pastor of the United Congregational church, whose meeting house is one of those big, ornate buildings, with stained-glass windows and dark woodwork everywhere. One year, we held a special Good Friday service with the Roman Catholic diocese. We walked behind a cross and the Catholic Bishop preached in our pulpit. So we had a lot of Catholics there for the first time. One comment I heard afterward always stuck with me “It’s a pretty church and the people are nice but oh my God! They don’t have any statues at all! I don’t know how you have a church without any saints!” For Reformed people like us, it’s a pretty fancy place, but for this woman, brought up in the lush environment of Italian Catholic churches, it was plain and soul-less and more importantly, saintless. I imagine she’d say the same about this meeting house. Personally, I love its simple lines, the way the light floods in from the windows, how it sits embraced by the trees. But there are no statues of saints.

Of course, there are reasons we don’t have statues. The practice of venerating saints was a cash cow for the Medieval Catholic Church, and it had gotten out of hand; buying and selling religious relics including bits and pieces of the bodies of saints was a big business in 1500 AD. When the Reformers, including our own fathers and mothers in the faith, were cleaning out the closet of church practices, they wrinkled their nose over the whole business and tossed it in the trash box. So does it even make sense to have All Saints’ Day in a Reformed Church?

Maybe it helps if we understand just what the word saint means. It comes from the same root that gives us all the words like elect and election; just like we choose a candidate for office and give them a job. We elect them; we choose them. Saint is the English translation of the Greek word for ‘elect’. The original idea was that God chooses people here, right here, in this world, in this community, for a purpose;  They are elected, chosen, and the word for ‘elect’ is translated as ‘saint’. Everyone chosen by God is a saint. 

We’ve just come through Halloween, celebrated in our country by putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else. One year, one of my churches held a memorable Halloween party. Our hall was full, there were a hundred kids and their parents, most of them working hard at looking like someone they aren’t. We had a half dozen Spidermen, at least two Wizard of Oz Dorothies; we had Megatron and Bumble Bee, we had a nice selection of princesses, Barbie, and enough witches for a coven. Superman and Supergirl both attended. We had zombies and clowns; we had costumes whose identity wasn’t entirely clear but seemed assembled just to be different. It’s fun to pretend to be someone else for a while; it’s fun to get out of yourself and into a costume.

What wasn’t obvious is that we also had a lot of saints present. They were saints without halos, of course, but saints nevertheless. It took pretty much everyone from our church to host the party, and we were all tired at the end. But we were there doing God’s work. You see, the Halloween party wasn’t just a good time; it was also a day when we demonstrated  free grace, showing off how we believe God cares without price, without purchase. One of the parents said to me, “I think we’re supposed to pay for all of this somewhere, but I didn’t see where.” I said, “No, it’s free; just a good time.” I was taking pictures and printing them. He asked how much the picture would cost; I said, “Nothing, it’s free”—and when he asked how much for another one of the whole family I said again, “It’s free.” It puzzled him, it really puzzled him; God grace always does, free grace always stuns us when we encounter a little of it; we’re used to paying our own way. 

We have lots of visions of life with God but many of them look like the one we heard from Isaiah this morning. 

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.  …Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces

Life with God looks like a party, in other words: a great, wonderful time of praise and joy and good things we all enjoy that God gives for free.The woman who said we didn’t have saints in our churches was wrong; we do have saints, but they are saints without halos. What is a saint? A saint is someone fulfilling God’s purpose. It isn’t hard to understand that purpose. When Jesus was asked what God wanted, he replied with the ancient teaching from Deuteronomy, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength” and added, “love your neighbor as yourself.” This is our purpose; this is our mission. It’s a good thing for us to remember it, it’s a good thing for us to celebrate it. For the purpose of a church is to help us dress up in the costume of a saint, in the life of a saint. What I mean is, to learn to live like this, to live like this every day. When you do this, when I do, then we are saints. That’s right: Saint Linda, Saint Diane, Saint Sigmund, Saint fill in your own name.

We don’t have statues; we do have memories. In a few moments, we celebrate the memory of our friends who passed on this year, completing their mission. But celebrating all saints includes all the saints who are here. And it also includes some people we don’t always think about: al the ones who aren’t here yet. So today, right now, I thank God for all those saints who have gone home to God, for all of you saints who are here and for the ones I haven’t met yet. May God’s blessing flow

Amen. 

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

22^nd Sunday After Pentecost • October 20, 2024

Isaiah 53:4-12, Mark 10:35-45

The city of Barcelona in Spain sits on a coastal plain in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. It’s been occupied by people since the Stone Age, and it’s been a port since before the time of Christ. In all those centuries, sailors have been able to find Barcelona by sighting the tall mountain of Montserrat that behind it, just as the Appalachian Mountains rise west of us. A cathedral sits up there now but long before the cathedral, the caves were homes. It’s easy for me to imagine a sailor seeking harbor, sighting Montserrat hours and hours before seeing Barcelona itself, knowing they have a definite destination, knowing where they are going. I get the same feeling every time I come here to Locust Grove. There’s the long drive down the highway, a few miles down Mount Joy street, the left turn we sometimes miss and then the tall steeple of this meeting house. It calls me, and I always smile seeing it. I know where I’m going; I know there will be all of you, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, I know what we are doing together. Today’s reading from Mark is a steeple, it’s a mountain, it’s a signpost to tell us where we are going following Jesus. Do you see the mountain? Do you see the signal? Are you ready to come along?

If we glance backward in the story, we remember Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, a man Jesus instantly loved, yet one whose faith would not carry him beyond the safety of his riches to follow. What riches do is promise is comfort and safety. Riches insulate you from suffering; they did then, they do now. I wonder how sad it made Jesus when he failed; I wonder how he felt comparing the man’s rejection to his own mission. Just after that, just before what we read this morning, Jesus again shares his view of the mountain he is climbing, the way he is walking.

He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, ³³saying, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; ³⁴they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.’ [Mark 10:31b-34]

Nothing safe there; nothing comfortable. 

The disciples don’t get it. It’s striking if you look at the whole story. This is the third time Jesus has told them about where he’s going. The first time, Peter rebukes him, the same word used about Jesus casting out demons; Peter means to cast out this idea of suffering. The second time, the disciples don’t understand and are afraid to ask Jesus what he means. This third time they seem too concerned about themselves to really take it in. Just before this, after Jesus says that riches and the comfort and safety they create make it hard to be saved, Peter says, “What about us?” And here we have James and John asking to be his right-hand men when he comes into power. It’s clear what they have in mind: Jesus is going to go to Jerusalem, work some major miracles, defeat the Romans and the Herodians and presto become king. Pow! Zowie! Super Jesus to the rescue! All kings need helpers; they want the top slots. It turns out the other disciples do too, they get mad about James and John putting in their bid first. They all want to be rich and powerful. They all think that’s what success means. Don’t we?

Most Christians have never truly embraced Jesus as a suffering servant any more than the first disciples did. Jacquelyn and I spent the last week in Spain and Spain is littered with cathedrals. We go to them because that’s where the art is and much of the art depicts Jesus suffering: Jesus being scourged, Jesus crucified, Jesus on the cross. We call them “dead Jesi” I once counted 12 in one room in a museum. But most of them are in churches dripping with gold and rich, ornate fixtures. Jesus suffers; the church does not.

It’s easy to just appreciate the art and roll our ideas at the implied theology, to see it as the high tide mark of Medieval Catholicism but contemporary Christianity here in America is often no better. So many today have swapped the passion and suffering of Jesus for Christian Nationalism, a sort of self-made church which replaces the cross with an American flag. Like James and John, we’d like to be powerful. We’d prefer taking up a weapon to offering the other cheek.

Jesus has nothing to do with Christian Nationalism. Instead, he points us back to Isaiah and the image of a servant. He says explicitly, “…whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. [Mark 10:44]” and he uses the word suffer to describe his mission. Just like us, ancient people thought success meant avoiding suffering, so the words of Isaiah must have shocked them. What kind of Messiah, what kind of king is crushed? What kind of Messiah, what kind of king is oppressed and afflicted? Just like us, when we think of suffering, their first impulse is to turn away; the second is to blame someone, often the person who suffers. The whole Book of Job is devoted to the problem of suffering and the answer proposed by Job’s friends is that it must be his fault.

But Jesus has a different understanding of suffering. He sees it not as an invitation to blame but as an occasion inviting response. The Gospel of Luke has a story not in the others in which Jesus is explicitly asked who is to blame for suffering and he replies that the problem is not who to blame but how to act; there he tells a parable in which the challenge of suffering is to repent and to bear good fruit. Now, Paul says in Galatians, 

…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, and self-control. [Galatians 5:22f]

Jesus describes his own suffering as a ransom. In his time, ransom was a word often used about a process for reclaiming someone from slavery. The fruit of the mission of Jesus is not political, it is instead a transformation of our lives so that they are changed and become about loving others. It is literally an inspiration: that is to say, an implanting of the Spirit of God into our hearts. We see that inspiration when we bear the fruit of the Spirit.

We see this on the large canvas of some lives in a way that transforms our community. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Writing about his own life and struggle against the slavery of racism, said, 

My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. … I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive. [Christian Century 77 April 1960 pg. 510]

King refused to let his suffering bind him; he refused to seek safety from suffering. On the last night of his life, speaking to sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, where the whole legal establishment of the city was against them and there were threats on his life, he said,

[delivered 3 April 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee]

In that terrible moment when that shot rang out, I know that the shooter was the slave, enslaved by the hatred of racism and the man he shot, that man of God, was a free man following Christ. Like Jesus, he knew the occasion of suffering; and like Jesus, he knew it as an opportunity to set God’s people free, to be a ransom for many, to live out inspiration.

 Well, it’s always dangerous to talk about a heroic, well known person. Because it’s easy to listen and cheer him on and think, what a hero he was. But we are not all heroes. We are not all great men and women. We are simply here, getting through this day and the next. We’re not wondering how to change the world, we’re wondering what’s for dinner tonight and did I take my pills. But we encounter suffering as well. Someone dies and we grieve. We think we’re doing fine and fall or suddenly the doctor gets that look, and we hear terrible news. What about us? I admire Dr. King, but what about the rest of us? 

So I want to tell you about another person who is a hero but perhaps only to me. Her name was Mattie and I knew her when I was first in the ministry. I thought of her as an old woman and you know, she was probably younger than I am now. Our frame of reference changes, doesn’t it? Shortly after I was called to her church as the pastor, she became very ill and went into the hospital. She was in a lot of pain at times, but she always managed to smile when I walked in the door. One day I went to see her and got to meet several of her family; after a little bit, she kicked them out and said, “I need to talk to the Reverend privately.” So they left, she had me close the door and then, she said, “Reverend, I’m going to die.” Now, I’d encountered people who were dead but that was my first one who announced it ahead of time. Then she told me she needed me to do something that was hard: this woman who is lying in a hospital bed, telling me she’s dying, she’s telling me it will be hard. And then she asked me to lie. “My family can’t admit I’m going and it will upset them and they’ll start fighting if you tell them I’m dying, so I need you to pretend you don’t know.” I was young then: 28, and I had pretty rigid principles and they didn’t include lying. But Mattie was so worried about her family that I agreed. I didn’t get it then, to be honest but I do now. There she was, laying in what a month or so later turned out to be her death bed, but she wasn’t fearing anything, she was just worried about her family, she was just loving her family.

We can spend our lives trying to avoid any suffering, looking down on those who do suffer, discussing why it’s their fault. Jesus summons us to another way, the way of love, the way of servanthood, the way of suffering love. Power and riches are no part of the mission of Jesus; they are no part of our mission. His mission is to transform us, to ransom us from the slavery of the world and to light our lives with the light of the spirit. And he asks today, as he asked then, “Are ye able?” May we become a blessing by saying yes, Lord, yes, I am able.

Amen.